1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method for loading a single head in a hard disk drive with a head loading mechanism, and more particularly to a method and mechanism for loading a single head directly onto the parking zone at an inner diameter of a hard disk.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various data storage devices are installed in electronic apparatus for communication and handling of data. Such devices include, for example, hard disk drives, floppy disk drives and Compact Disk-Read Only Memory (CD-ROM) drives. As computers have evolved into more sophisticated computer systems with smaller dimensions and lighter weight, efforts have been directed at providing increasing amounts of data storage with smaller weight or physical dimensions.
Conventionally, a hard disk drive contains a plurality of magnetic disks for storage of data, mounted onto a spindle motor and rotated by the spindle motor at high speed. A plurality of heads magnetize and sense the magnetic field of the disks and are imbedded into sliders which. In turn, are connected to corresponding suspensions by corresponding gimbals. The suspensions are connected with an actuator arm. The heads are suspended at distal ends of the suspensions over the disks, and read the data from the disks and pass it to the drive electronics so it can be transferred to the computer.
In conventional manufacturing of hard disk drives, the head stack is pre-assembled, and every two adjacent heads are positioned face to face so as to sense magnetic fields of a disk from two sides thererof. A tool forming multiple isolating arms, is used to separate the adjacent two heads face to face for avoiding damages of the heads. The magnetic disks are preloaded in a baseplate of a hard disk drive on a spindle motor. The heads are merged with the disks from the outer diameter of the disk of the data zone after the disks are settled down, then the tool is detached and the heads are moved to the parking zone of the inner diameter of the disk while the disk are rotating.
However, the typical method for loading heads in hard disk drives has risk to damage the valuable data zone on the disks especially at the outer diameter when the heads are firstly loaded onto the disks. Moreover, the conventional method requires additional electricity to drive the spindle motor to rotate at high speed, and requires corresponding controlling electronics to control turning on or off the spindle motor to actuate rotation of the disks or stop rotation of the disks in order to load the heads. Furthermore, nowadays there is no need of multiple disks, for only one disk or even one side of a disk is competent for capacity requirement with the improvement of disk density technology.
It is thus desirable to provide a method for loading a single head to a single disk in a hard disk drive for the problems discussed above.